Whicker: Boxing refuses to be counted out

July 12, 2013

Updated Aug. 21, 2013 12:28 p.m.

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Juan Manuel Marquez celebrates after defeating Manny Pacquiao by a sixth-round knockout in their welterweight bout at the MGM Grand Garden Arena last December in Las Vegas. Marquez is scheduled to fight Tim Bradley on Oct. 12 in one of the most anticipated bouts of the next six months. AL BELLO, GETTY IMAGES

Juan Manuel Marquez celebrates after defeating Manny Pacquiao by a sixth-round knockout in their welterweight bout at the MGM Grand Garden Arena last December in Las Vegas. Marquez is scheduled to fight Tim Bradley on Oct. 12 in one of the most anticipated bouts of the next six months. AL BELLO, GETTY IMAGES

Boxing has been dying for 50 years. Maybe it should go ahead and unplug the ventilator.

Bob Arum, Richard Schaefer, Dan Goossen and the other promoters can take time off.

As it is, they are packing the rest of 2013 with the longest parade of appealing fights in recent memory, with Tim Bradley's victory over Ruslan Provodnikov, along with Mike Alvarado's rematch conquest of Brandon Rios, already jousting for Fight of the Year.

Schaefer is close to nailing down a Sept. 14 run-in between light-welterweight champ Danny Garcia, the latest Philadelphia star, and the jaw-busting Lucas Matthysse of Argentina.

That is a main event any other time, but Garcia-Matthysse would be the prelude to Floyd Mayweather's MGM Grand bout with Canelo Alvarez. Schaefer predicts that card will break all pay-per-view records.

Arum's Top Rank counters Oct 12 with Bradley against Juan Manuel Marquez at Las Vegas' Thomas & Mack Center. It is Marquez's first appearance since he flattened Manny Pacquiao last fall.

On Nov. 24, on the casino-studded island of Macau, Pacquiao tries to regain his pound-for-pound footing against Rios.

The appetizers aren't bad either.

On Aug. 24, the unbeaten Abner Mares continues his onward, upward path against Jhonny Gonzalez at the StubHub Center, formerly The Home Depot Center and, in reality, the Leather Shop, considering how many hard body shots have been exchanged on its tennis court.

Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., who is coming off suspension and needs to shrink from his current 185-plus pounds, is tentatively set to meet Brian Vera at Staples Center on Sept. 7. This will be Chavez's first appearance since his frenzied 12th round almost snatched a victory over Sergio Martinez last September.

Nonito Donaire, coming off a loss to Guillermo Rigondeaux, is close to a fight with former bantamweight champ Vic Darchinyan.

Vladimir Klitschko, the dominant heavyweight for the past eight years, will meet undefeated Olympic champ Alexander Povetkin in Moscow on Oct. 5. Maybe that doesn't move you off the couch, but it's a $23 million promotion, and Klitschko is guaranteed $17 million. A dinosaur can stretch that a long way.

That does not count Schaefer's proposed match between Adrien Broner and Marcos Maidana.

It also does not include Gennady Golovkin, the current seismic force, whose body-shot knockout of Matthew Macklin caused DiBella, Sergio Martinez's promoter, to shudder. Anybody for Golovkin vs. Andre Ward?

But how could this be? Wasn't boxing supposed to shrivel up permanently when Mayweather and Pacquiao couldn't find common canvas?

Didn't the feud between Arum and Schaefer deprive us of so many potential classics, such as Donaire-Mares, that America turned to the smoothly organized UFC for sensible combat?

Well, those should have been problems. But they're not, because so many talented young athletes, worldwide, ignored the obituary, climbed into the ring and KO'd politics.

"Everybody tries to make it personal between Golden Boy and us," Arum said the other day. "It's not personal. It's just that things have changed.

"Our sponsors are different. They've got Corona. We've got Tecate. Their fights are on Showtime. Ours are on HBO. Don King and I didn't get along but we were able to put together fights, but it was much simpler then. I'm a businessman. It's not a matter of 'like.' I'm not going to bed with them."

In fact, Arum thinks the HBO/Showtime staredown has helped, not hurt, boxing. Each network is under the gun to produce a "talker" of a fight, a quality event that will lead the viewer to watch the next one.

Not even Schaefer's habit of trying to piggyback his fights on Arum's dates has been a crisis. On Sept. 14, Canelo fought Joselito Lopez less than a mile away from Chavez-Martinez.

"Our fight was pay-per-view, theirs wasn't," Arum said. "But it worked out fine because everybody's got these (DVR) machines. They would watch our fight, then watch the other one because they had it taped. All it did was make for a longer night of good boxing."

Nobody is saying boxing will be the national pastime again, or even get back to prime time.

But here's Freddie Roach, master of the second-floor Wild Card Gym in Hollywood, now buying out the first floor and expanding.

And here's Madison Square Garden, which bought The Forum in Inglewood last year, planning to spruce it up and restore its '60s and '70s status as a L.A. boxing source.

Larry Merchant, the HBO analyst and newspaper boxing maven, is still wary of the HBO/Showtime rivalry and might not be ready to take a golden paintbrush to this age.

He also has seen many bare chalk outlines, and no body.

"It's the same thing people always said about boxing," Merchant said, from his increasingly coveted front-row seat. "You can't save it, but you can't kill it."

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